YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew McCabe

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2021-02-04

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2021-02-04

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1. “Terrible for these people who are in the bureau now who will never know another day in the bureau when they don't have to deal with that kind of suspicion and those false accusations. It's really unfortunate what he's done.”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “You know, It's significant. It's significant what he's done to the FBI. And I think some of these scars, they will recover. They will continue doing their jobs in an exemplary way that the men and women of the Bureau do every day. I have no doubt in that. But this stuff can't be erased. There will always be some segment of the population that has a lower degree of trust for the FBI. idea that the FBI might have been working against the president in some sort of surreptitious conspiracy. It's just incredibly corrosive to confidence and trust that as FEI agents, we rely on every day. And that's never going away. That is never going away.”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Relationship. It's a presidential investigations 101. No, it's not that it's teaching a class in national security law and policy.”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I am. I just started teaching at George Mason University in the Shar School of Government Policy. And that's really awesome. What is it?”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “I was, I wouldn't ever consider myself that again. But yeah, I voted for Republican presidents in every presidential election until 2016. And I said, I can't ever imagine doing that again under any circumstances. They've become such a mess. But so yeah, so to go from one day being this quiet, unassuming government professional who is concerned about security and safety but keeps a low profile intentionally. And the next day your entire life is blown up and people are talking about you as some sort of like horrible spy that should go to prison. I mean or be killed. It's terrifying and unbelievably disorienting and disruptive to really every aspect of your life. It was really hard on my kids. There were teenagers and so very aware of what was going on. Incredibly tough on my wife. But they're all very strong, resilient people and we.”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Yeah, I mean, there still are. So you live, you know, you do your, I intended to retire when I turned 50. I'd had, would have had almost 22 years in the bureau at that point. And so that would have been my plan from the beginning. Just to go off into the private sector and, you know, not have to go to sleep every night worrying about protecting America. I was kind of looking forward to that. And yeah, I'd never, never, ever, ever wanted to be a public figure in any way. And when the president starts to attack you and your wife and your family, that's over. You know, all of a sudden you become not just a public figure, but this like polarizing, like, it's not really me. It's what people think I am, this crazy legend of, you know, some sort of deep state, covert operative trying to overturn the results of the election.”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “No No, it didn't. Honestly, I was actually kind of taken by surprise by that allegation that came out of that initial Wall Street Journal article. It just seems so utterly ridiculous to me. You know, my wife ran in 2015. I wasn't even in headquarters at the time. I was working in Washington Philadelphia. I had nothing to do with the Clinton email case. Turning a call if it was the governor of our state and the leader of the Democratic Party, my wife ran as a Democrat. He supported, he recruited her to run because he wanted a doctor in Louden County who would support trying to expand access to health care. That's the only reason she ran is because it's, you know, it's been her life's work. So the idea that there was something untoward about the head of the party supporting a candidate, which he supported six candidates in that race, she was not the one who received.”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “And so I recused from every case, every public corruption case that had to do with Virginia, just to stay away from anything remotely Virginia politics.”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Yeah, I talk to all those people. I talk to my boss at the time who was then Deputy Director, Mark Juliano. And I spoke to our head of the ethics office, there's a guy named Pat Kelly and met with him and he laid out the hatch act and the things that I could do and couldn't do and kind of divided it into like during this period of the campaign. Here's what you need to worry about. And then if she's elected, there's other things you need to be concerned about, but we'll hold on that for now. And having been kind of shown the way to do it correctly, I still held out the prospect that the director might not want me to do it. And I asked his chief of staff and he spoke to the director and called me back and said, director says it's fine. She should do whatever she wants. And then I recused myself from, I was at the time running the FBI Washington Field Office, which covers Northern Virginia.”

   2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Again, I said I'm not sure what you're referring to. And he said, Your wife, and I said, well, if you mean her running for office, I don't see that as a mistake. I supported it then. I support her now. And I think it was a great decision. It didn't work out. But, you know, some things don't work out. Then he said, Oh, yeah, yeah. She's great. Everybody I know says she's great. And I remember thinking, you don't know anyone who knows my wife. That's ridiculous. It's just such nonsense.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “And I had the slightest idea what he was talking about to ask them. He's like, I don't know what you mean. And he said, I thought you were, I understand that you were not a friend of Jim Comey's and that you didn't agree with him on what he did and you weren't a part of all that. And I said, no, that's not true. I worked very closely with Jim. I have great respect for him. And I was a part of all those decisions. And so from that point, it was just like downhill from there. So yeah, by the time we had wrapped up, you know, towards the end of that meeting, he brought up my wife again. He's like, he said. The only problem with you is that one mistake you made.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Come on down. No dinner for me, so I don't know what that means. But Yeah, so I went down there. I'd never been in the Oval Office, been to the White House a million times for meetings in the sit room, things like that, but never been to the Oval. And so I had to have somebody show me how to get to it. And I walked in and he just launched how he does. He's in performance mode all the time. And he started just kind of like really this kind of manic rant about how great it was that they fired the director and everybody hated him. Wasn't it true that everybody hated him? And did I know that everybody hated him? And isn't it great? He's gone. And so I was just standing there. And then he launched into like, I heard you were part of the resistance.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Yeah. He didn't, you know, in his comments to gym, it was just like this real threatening, you know, what's the, does that guy have a problem with me? Kind of the suggestion being, because if he does, you know, I'm going to come after him. And then at one point he asked, he was mad at Jim about something else. And he said, you know, I let you keep that deputy. So there's no question that the guy was not happy with me. So then I met him for the first time on the day that Jim is fired. Jim gets, I find out about the Attorney General tells me that they've fired the director at about maybe 5.30 in the afternoon on Tuesday, May 9th, 2017. And I get a message that Trump wants to see me in the Oval Office that night. So I go down.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “It's crazy. So, yeah, I'll start it in October right before the election in 2016 when he picked up on the comments made in the Wall Street Journal article that we were talking about before. And he started ranting and raving about me and my wife during his campaign rally, saying all kinds of horrible inaccurate things, accusing me of being corrupt, accusing her of having been corrupt when she ran for office in Virginia in 2015. That was if not bad enough. Jim Comey starts meeting with Trump in January after he gets inaugurated. And in, I want to say three or four of those meetings, Trump brought me up with Comey saying like, what's the deal with that deputy of yours? You know, does he have a problem with me in a very kind of like threatening way? And Jim was, you know, insistent that no, that wasn't the case.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Yeah, it's crazy to hear you say your relationship with Donald Trump. You're right, but it's just the idea of having a relationship with Donald Trump is just still.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “The results of that interview and sent those results to me, and I saw what they had written about this exchange, it realized that it was not correct. And so I never signed the statement. I called them back to my office and explained to them that this was wrong, that I had, you know, I recalled authorizing others to release this information. So it's been wildly misrepresented first and worst, I would say, by the inspector general's office themselves and the problems just essentially grew from there”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “The question that I got about that came to me about seven months after that interaction with the Wall Street Journal, seven months or so, completely out of context in an inappropriate way, in the middle of an interview about an entirely different matter, which I had asked the inspection division within the FBI to investigate a separate leak that had occurred presumably from one of my meetings, which concerned me greatly. And so they brought this prior months old interaction up. Of course, all this happened on the day that Jim Comey got fired. So it was a bit of a hectic day. And I didn't, I answered the question incorrectly. And ultimately, they wrote.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “There's absolutely no reason, there's no reason to do that. This is a long and complicated tale that I'm somewhat limited in what I can discuss with you because it is a subject of a federal lawsuit that I filed against the department and the FBI. But let me just say that first of all, to clarify, not a leak, right? There are two people in the FBI that have the authority to authorize a release of information to the media, to the director and the deputy director. And so that's what I did in the course of my job. You deal with requests from the media every day and you're constantly making decisions about what you can and should respond to and what you shouldn't. So people who disagree with the decision of sharing that information with the press, hey, fine, reasonable minds can differ. But that was my responsibility at the time.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Re characterization in the later Pfizer requests. We should have. We should have put that in so the judges could weigh it against everything else they knew about the Steele dossier and make their own decision. And those were mistakes that were made in the package.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “We did that was the issue, the kind of the final issue that we worked with the Justice Department on to determine how should we include that? How do you accurately describe this in the package? And ultimately, the department wrote a footnote. It's about a page and a half long and described it exactly as you have. So I think the provenance of the information was accurately described in the first FISA package. The bigger problems came later when months later the investigators had had the opportunity to interview one of the subsources whose reporting actually ended up in the steel dossier. And during that interview, the subsource kind of walked away from the reporting a little bit and said, oh, well, you know, I was exaggerating or that was just barroom talk or something like that. And we failed to include that.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “So the fact that we weren't 100% convinced of what we had with the steel information when it was used in the initial FISA package is not Un”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “That's right. That's right. And there were other mistakes made in the course of those FISA packages, you know, information that we were collecting during the course of the investigation that maybe contradicted elements of the steel reporting and that was not reported to the court in the way it should have been. And that's unforgivable. And, you know, those are the kinds of things that we have to fix. I mean, I don't think anyone sees that any differently now. But the overall question kind of let's step back 100,000 foot level about the steel information. The FBI gets information all the time. And much of it isn't verified and absolutely proven correct. But oftentimes that still unverified information makes its way into affidavits and requests for surveillance coverage, that sort of thing. And as long as you represent accurately represent it as unverified information, that's acceptable to the court.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “That's correct. That's correct. So when we opened the case, which is now well known as Crossfire Hurricane, we opened that as the major investigation and we opened individual cases on four people. Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. So each one of those individual cases is kind of moving forward at its own pace. only one of those four that was appropriate to pursue FISA in at that time was Carter Page We worked with the Department of Justice to get a FISA. They didn't think we had quite enough and then we received the Steel information. We felt like adding that to the package gave us enough and the department agreed and it went forward. I think that there's so much misunderstood about that set of information and what we did with it. We definitely made mistakes that we now know about in the”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Be clear, the dossier, the information from Christopher Steele had nothing to do with the opening of the case on the Trump campaign because we didn't have it at the time we opened the case. We opened the case at the end of July. We didn't get the information from Steele until I'm going to say like middle of September. So it had no role in the opening of case. It did play a role in one aspect of the case, which was pursuing a FISA warrant, so that's a court order to permit electronic surveillance on Carter Page.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Yeah, yeah, no, it's a good question. No regrets about the major decisions that we made there really was very clear cut. It was not a debate over whether or not we should open a case. Of course, when you look back with hindsight, there's always things that you think we could have done better. The decision to open the case was absolutely undeniably called for. Had we not opened a case on the Russians under those circumstances to understand how and why the government of Russia was interfering with a domestic political campaign, a campaign for the presidency? I mean, that had we not opened a case, we would have been derelict.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “So now we know what they wanted to do. We know what they actually did. And it is only after that happens the friendly foreign diplomat brings George Papadopoulos' comments to our attention. So now, knowing what the Russians did, now we also understand that the campaign may have been aware of this, was at least offered this assistance that we know took place and may have accepted it. you know, colluded with the Russians along those lines. So at that point, opening a case on the campaign was absolutely necessary.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Notes to us in May of 2016, an individual associated with the Trump campaign, right? George Papadopoulos, has a conversation with a friendly foreign diplomat in London in which he tells the diplomat that the Russians have offered to help the campaign by providing dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails. Then, of course, in the lead up to the convention, the Democratic Convention in 2016, we see them actually release the information and weaponize it against Hillary Clinton.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Sure. Really started with our awareness of and concern about Russian maligned cyber activity. And really that goes back to almost like the end of 2014 when we became aware of the fact that the Russians were targeting in cyberspace a number of our political, academic institutions, political institutions, think tanks, other places. So they were breaking into these closed systems and stealing information, stealing emails using that to gain access to other systems, just the typical stuff in 2015. We see that activity being directed at political institutions like the DNC and the RNC. And then that activity continues into 2016. And then as this is happening.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Yeah, so I can only really speak about people who are investigations about them have become public. So Felix Sater is one of those people. Felix Sater was investigated by my squad in New York for quite a long time. And so I was definitely familiar with him. There are others. There are many people in the kind of Trump orbit, many Russians who have kind of become persons of interest or subjects of investigation. LMZEN talked to Hunov, who is the Russian organized crime figure who is accused of essentially corrupting the Olympics in 2002, was a tenant in Trump Tower. So there's like, you know, there's a lot of cross-pollination there between people that we were investigating in the Russian. Community and folks who are, you know, in the Trump orbit.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “You're kind of an expert on Yeah, I worked. I spent those 10 years working on Russian criminal matters and doing that work. I developed a pretty keen sense of what the Russians were doing on the foreign counterintelligence side of the FBI as well, right? So there's a massive effort within the FBI, tons and tons of agents that investigate Russian intelligence activity in the United States. And so coming from that background, you know, understood and appreciated the significance of the threat that was posed by the possibility of Russian government meddling and interfering and assisting a campaign for the presidency. That was something that we all took very seriously and certainly. I took it very seriously.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Yeah, I mean, I have infrequent contact with them here and there, notes here and there, Christmas cards, that sort of stuff, but we're not like, we're not, we were close at work. We worked, you know, very closely together for a long time, but we weren't like, you know, best buds, you know, golfing buddies outside of work or anything.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “At the time, I think very differently about it now. I think we departed from our traditional role as the FBI in a way that put the FBI in great jeopardy. I think we clearly had a massive negative impact on Hillary Clinton's campaign in a way that we shouldn't have. I've tried to be really, I don't know, kind of brutally honest about that and the way that I've thought about it and talked about it and written about it since then. I know that, you know, I don't know that Jim has changed his mind about the way he sees those things. And that's his, you know, that's his prerogative, is certainly his perspective. Yeah, I see those things differently now than I did then.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “Yeah, yeah. So I guess my general comment earlier is not entirely accurate. The decision that Jim made in November to announce the reopening of the case, notify Congress. I didn't agree with that then. I thought it was a mistake then. I would have advised Jim not to do that, but he asked me not to weigh in on the issue because at the time the question of whether or not I would have to recuse from the case had become something that we were also trying to figure out. And so because of the pendency that he said, I don't want to involve you in this. So I didn't actually play a role in that decision. Had I, I would have strenuously told him not to do it. I thought it was a mistake to tell anyone what we were doing before we knew what we were doing. So anyway, that aside, the decision in July to announce the conclusion of the investigation, I supported it.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “So having had that experience in the summer, it's my belief that going into the decision, Jim's decision in November to inform Congress that we were essentially reopening the case to evaluate the emails that had been uncovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop. Did our prior experience of seeing how the fury was kind of the backlash leaking out to the media, all that kind of stuff? Did that have an impact on Jim's decision? Yeah, I expect it did. I didn't talk to Jim about that decision at the time for some other reasons. But I think Yeah, I think that whole scene how the institution reacted in July, and particularly the New York Field Office in July, I think had an impact on the decision making.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “So, I don't know that our concern, I don't want to speak for Jim, but I don't know that our concern was really very Giuliani focused. With the initial decision on July 5th in the Hillary Clinton investigation for Jim to go forward and make the announcement that he did at headquarters, that provoked such an incredible backlash from within the organization. There was a lot of, quite frankly, just wildly inaccurate, like, you know, conspiratorial things kind of leaking out of the FBI into the media. And a lot of that was going on in New York. We knew that there would be many people in the organization that were frustrated by our decision in the case. I think we underestimated how they would, you know, kind of lash out by talking to the media and stuff like that.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “People start to get angry. Everyone knows everyone in New York. It's kind of a media center as well. And so there are many agents in New York who have kind of bumped elbows with reporters and writers at different times in their career, having worked big cases and things like that. So there's infinitely more opportunities for employees of the office and agents in the office to interact with members of the media. So all that is a very bad combination when you're trying to be responsible about information.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “Yeah, it definitely was. It definitely was. I mean, it is. I think it all comes from that same place, right? There's this culture in the FBI's New York field office that they play by New York rules, right? It's different than every other field office. They take kind of direction from headquarters when they have to, but most of the time, you know, they kind of chart their own course. That can work for you and against you. The New York Field Office is able to accomplish things that no other office can do because of their experience, because of their size, their capability, their aggression in pursuing cases and with the districts, the U.S. Attorney's Offices. But on the other hand, they can be really hard to control. And I think you see that in things like information making its way to the media against, of course, against FBI policy.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “And it's so busy and fast paced that as a new agent, you don't have a lot of direct supervision. You can kind of chase your interests, whatever direction they're going to go and having a really big case as a young agent happens all the time in New York. Whereas smaller offices, that's harder to work out.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “New York was you either wanted to go to New York. Is you're in your training class at Quantico as a new FBI new agent? There was always a few people in the class who wanted to go to New York. And then there was the entirety of the rest of the class who wanted to go any place except New York. And I was one of the few who wanted to go back. And it's just like all things about New York, it's overwhelming. It's big. It's loud. It's fast. It's disorganized, chaotic. But at the same time, it's the greatest work in the FBI. There's just so much you can do. It's the biggest field office in the FBI. There are about 1,200 agents and about another 1,200 support staff working there. There's about 10% of the FBI works in New York. And you can just do anything. There's so much going on.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “No, I couldn't. I couldn't. They were under a hiring freeze when I graduated from law school. So I looked and looked for a job, had a terrible time trying to find what was really bad, you know, bad economy for the legal market at that time, 1993. And I took a job with a really small firm in Camden, New Jersey. And I just did, you know, whatever walked in the door. I had met some great people work for great people and had a pretty neat experience in private practice as a lawyer for a couple years.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Terrible at math, so science wasn't really an option. Math always been a reader, you know, and a writer. And so I kind of gravitated to those classes in high school. I've always been interested in government and politics. And it was a political science major at Duke. And so law school just seemed like, you know, the right next step for me as I was getting out of college is I look back on it now. I kind of wish I had done something in between the two, something very different. But yeah, on those days, I thought she just head right to law school and keep moving forward.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “To see the work of FBI agents. So, FBI agents go out and do an interview and they record that interview on a document called an FD302, Federal Document 302. And so I spent the whole summer reading 302s and like getting this kind of insider's glimpse into what agents do it, how they are able to sit down and have a conversation, a revealing conversation with really anyone on earth. And I just became obsessed with that idea and the kind of access and the intelligence and the information it would make available to you. It would literally like a ticket to see every different piece of society, every different way that people live. And so that's, it just totally hooked me.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Know I wasn't one of those kids who sat around watching FBI files on TV and dreaming about being an agent. And so many people in the FBI, you know, came to it that way. I really became kind of hooked on the idea when I was in law school. So the summer between my second and third year in law school, I came to D.C. I was going to law school in Washington University in St. Louis. And I came to DC to be a volunteer intern at the Department of Justice. And I started working, I always thought I might want to be a prosecutor. And so I was working on these big cases and I had the opportunity to read.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “A lot of these guys are very heavily armed, many of them bring law enforcement and military training to this activity, which makes it even more lethal. So, yeah, it is not, it's no joke.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “It makes everything more dangerous for law enforcement in this country. You know, we saw that an incredible tragedy yesterday in Fort Lauderdale, where a group of agents working crimes against children cases approached an apartment to execute a search warrant for a standard business that happens around the country in countless places every day. And the individual inside who I'm sure knew what knew the gig was up on his private life of abusing children and took out his high-powered rifle and shot all the agents standing in front of his door. That is the threat that we face every time we leave the office and go out to knock on someone's door. This particular threat, the domestic terrorist threat, I mean, you've seen the same pictures I have, and not just from the capital, but like all summer at the protests.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “You know, the FBI's number one priority is preventing an act of terrorism in the United States. And this is the most likely act of terrorism that we're going to have in the United States in the foreseeable future. So it's a huge problem.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “To act very hard to do though, right? Because there's a ton of really inflammatory, violent comments out there on social media. And the challenge is trying to figure out who's actually planning something and, you know, who's just pounding their chest and talking about it.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “There's no question that the impeachment proceeding could serve as kind of a triggering event for any one of these groups or individuals. This is not just a threat that was focused on the nation's capital. It's a threat that literally comes from every corner of this country. And we've seen in the last few months people taking that grievances and that anger and targeting it at state houses in Michigan and other states. So if I am If I were running the FBI right now, we would be on a very, very high alert. I would have dedicated command posts open in every office. People would be reaching out to all of their sources of information, human sources of information informants. They'd be looking very closely at the chatter that we're able to see online and just looking for people who you think are planning.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “That's the same thing we saw with the crowd on the sex. You've got law enforcement and military, but it's not exclusively law enforcement and military. You've got politicians and business people and doctors and Out of work steel workers, and you know, you name it, it's a very, very diverse crowd.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Dave, in 2014, when we started really tracking Americans who were traveling to Syria for the purpose of affiliating with Islamic State and joining the fight, started with a few people, and then that chart got bigger and bigger and bigger as we went along. And what we found was exactly what you've just described. We expected it to be underprivileged young men who had no prospects and were drawn into this death cult. It wasn't that. It was people, it was men, it was women. It was American citizens. It was immigrants to this country, people who were born into born Muslim, people who converted to Islam. It was doctors, lawyers, academics. It's America. It is the cross-section that you see if you gather up any group of people.”

    2021-02-04 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 428 — Andrew McCabe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source